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God and the American Writer does more to illuminate the fundamental purposes and motivations of our greatest writers from Hawthorne to Faulkner than any study I have read in the past fifty-five years--that is, since the same author's On Native Grounds. --Louis S. Auchincloss This is the culminating work of the finest living critic of American literature. Alfred Kazin brings a lifetime of thought and reading to the triumphant elucidation of his fascinating and slippery subjects: what the meaning of God has been for American writers, and how those writers, from the New England Calvinists to William Faulkner, have expressed it. In a series of trenchant critical studies of writers as divergent as Hawthorne, Melville, Emerson, Lincoln, Whitman, Dickinson, Twain, William James, Eliot, Frost, and Faulkner, Kazin gives a profound sense of each, and his quotations from their works are artfully chosen to pursue the main theme. The centerpiece of the book is the reflection in American writing of the great American tragedy, the Civil War--so deeply involved in the whole complex issue of religion in America. An enthralling book by a major writer. "This is a book about the place of God in the imaginative life of a country that for two centuries countenanced slavery and then engaged in a fratricidal war to end it. For Americans no subject is more compelling or, in its entanglement with the deepest roots of the national soul, more terrible. And no one has ever written as incisively, as movingly, or as unforgivingly about it as Alfred Kazin has here." --Louis Menand "In the era of willful obfuscation, Alfred Kazin is the good, clear word, a brilliant scholar and an original reader. His latest book, God and the American Writer, which comes fifty-five years after On Native Grounds, proves he has lost nothing and gives us everything he has." --David Remnick "American writers have been born into all sorts of religious sects, but have had to struggle in solitude to make sense of God. Alfred Kazin, a cosmos unto himself, has written brilliantly and affectingly of how a dozen or so of our finest authors--poets, novelists, philosophers, and one president--endured and illuminated that struggle. Kazin is sometimes passionate, even fierce, especially in his discussions of slavery and of his hero (and mine), Abraham Lincoln. But, as ever, Kazin's writing is tempered by an enormous American empathy and by his sense of irony about our country and its spiritual predicaments. Spare, sharp, and immensely learned, God and the American Writer is the most moving volume of criticism yet by our greatest living critic." --Sean Wilentz
评论 (4)
出版社周刊评论
Secular treatments of God can be the more interesting if only because of their heavy doses of doubt. Writing with the full force of his crisp and lucid style, Kazin (On Native Grounds) is chiefly concerned with demonstrating how each of the 12 major writers he covers traded heavily on their own doubts and discarded conventional Christian faith to invent a personal version of God. Such individualism marks Kazin's American style of dealing with the Almighty. Stretching often beyond the boundaries of its title, each chapter is a wondrous essay on American historyeven brief treatments of Twain and Lincoln seem monumental. Only a few of the pieces have been previously published. Kazin proves himself that rarest of modern creaturesa writer who can abide the artistry of another whose political views he considers repugnant. Faced with T.S. Eliot's legendary prejudices, Kazin was asked, "`How can you admire such an enemy of the Jews?' I replied that if I had to exclude anti-Semites, I would have little enough to read." The breadth of Kazin's humor and humanity makes this book a joy. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus评论
Writing with his usual stylistic verve and penetration, Kazin examines our great authors' uneasy but self-sufficient sense of God. In his fifth decade of producing criticism, Kazin masterfully continues the old-fashioned, demanding critical tradition of intimately reading the great works and grounding an analysis of them in a sense of history and biography. Like his survey of nature in American letters, A Writer's America: Landscape in Literature (1988), this new work is a focused retracing of manifestations of our country's brand of Protestantism, typically Calvinist, in the works of major writers, from Hawthorne's struggles with his Puritan inheritance to Faulkner's God-forsaken vision of the postCivil War South. Kazin is not out to reassess his familiar subjects-- Melville, Whitman, Dickinson, T. S. Eliot, etc.--in any radical fashion, however passionately he writes about them. Nor, in his august manner, does he acknowledge much previous critical writing, even, most obviously, Van Wyck Brooks on Puritanism, Twain, or Emerson. Often, basic close readings are the chief matter, such as of Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, Whitman's Leaves of Grass, and Dickinson's poetry. When he finds a good anecdote or quote, he is apt to repeat it for its own sake, to say nothing of his dropping of eminent names. Deflating memories of the elderly Robert Frost in his egotistical, hoary-Yankee mode caustically pervade an examination of the poet's complex views of human existence and natural design. Conversely, Kazin musters a stirring, fervently moral tone to take on the religious watershed of abolitionism and the Civil War, encompassing Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (``New England's last holiness'') and Lincoln's remarkable Second Inaugural Address on divine providence. Often more ecstatic than analytic, still this is an intensely erudite rereading of American authors' varieties of religious experience.
《书目》(Booklist)书评
Kazin's fluency in literature and history is evident on every page of this critical tour de force as he does nothing less than parse the evolution of American spirituality. At the height of his interpretative and scholarly powers, Kazin brilliantly elucidates the religious passions and reservations that shaped the work of Hawthorne, Melville, Whitman, Dickinson, Eliot, Frost, and Faulkner. He zeros in on what exactly is unique about each writer's work, then offers fresh analyses not only of their attitudes toward religion and God but also--and this is the unexpected heart of the book--of their moral and spiritual response to slavery and the racism that persists in its wake. This focus has inspired unforgettable passages about Harriet Beecher Stowe's astonishing influence and Lincoln's nonconformist religious views and "literary genius," as well as deep considerations of how writers' struggles to come to terms with the Civil War impacted their work. Kazin also traces Melville's travels in the Holy Land; contrasts Whitman's all-embracing spirituality and "boundless affirmation" with Dickinson's "shattering sense of what pure being is like"; shares reminiscences of Frost; and revels in Faulkner's "great kingdom of characters." American spirituality can ultimately be defined, Kazin concludes, as a faith in "unlimited freedom," and it is the conflict between this ideal and reality that our greatest writers confront. --Donna Seaman
Choice 评论
Robert Detweiler probed the public aspects of religion and literature in Uncivil Rites (CH, Feb'97), and William Lynch tried long ago to examine the religious "dimensions" of the literary imagination (Christ and Apollo, 1960). But Kazin explores the private religious imaginations of writers from Hawthorne to Faulkner (Melville is a favorite): "I am interested not in the artist's professions of belief but in the imagination he brings to his tale of religion in human affairs." Readers should be grateful to Kazin for turning his own luminous imagination and erudition on this timely topic. In the tradition of Edmund Wilson and H.L. Mencken, Kazin eschews technical jargon in favor of a lucid account of, to paraphrase Flannery O'Connor, America's "God-haunted" writers, whether the self be proclaimed as God (e.g., Whitman) or whether the writer claims no adherence to God (Faulkner). In an age in which "a politicized, intolerant, and paranoic religion, always crowing of its popularity, is too public and aims to coerce the rest of us," Kazin holds up for scrutiny the American writer, who shares "no common religious heritage at all" and who revels in his resistance to "the mob." Kazin's sane voice speaks lovingly in troubled times. All academic and public libraries should own this book. E. J. Dupuy St. Joseph Seminary College